burn salve
by werewolfery
Summary: Dabi's not looking for pity, but with a body held together with nothing but surgical staples and conviction, he's not in a position to turn away free medical treatment if he wants to last long enough to see his goals through. Sure, this civilian clearly doesn't know what she's getting herself into, but she can't seem to keep her healing hands off him. Her quirk won't let her.
1. Chapter 1

**burn salve - one**

The rain was coming down in sheets, and while Dabi knew it wasn't enough to put out his flames if he needed them, resembling a drowned rat didn't give him the look he was going for on this little recruiting drive. He wasn't quite sheltered from the downpour in the lee of the abandoned house he was waiting behind, and the water seeped through his jacket and into his shirt, making the fabric cling to his burns in a way that would inevitably irritate his surgical staples. Another exciting evening of wound-care to look forward to later, then. Nothing he wasn't used to, but it wasn't an omen that boded well for much of fucking anything.

He didn't have high hopes for the guy he was waiting up for to start with. Sure, he had been overheard spouting Stain's ideology while beating down that small-time hero last month, but any piece of trash could use those words to justify running wild. It didn't mean they had the strength or even the sincere desire to actually _change _anything about this decaying society. He worked with more than a few people like that already, unfortunately, and wasn't eager to add more.

What pissed Dabi off the most was that of all the potential recruits he had found, the only useful one so far was a literally bird-brained hero. He wasn't stupid enough to believe Hawks' flimsy excuses for wanting to go from beloved Pro Hero to villain overnight, but there seemed to be a good chance Dabi could wring intel and resources out of him before he wrung his neck.

Give him a principled criminal over a dishonest hero any day.

Heavy, squelching footfalls snapped him back to reality. They sounded unsteady; Dabi grimaced, hoping the other villain wasn't drunk. He really didn't want to deal with that shit right now.

A massive, hulking figure turned the corner, and Dabi could already read the aggression in its tensed shoulders and balled fists. _At least I don't have to waste time figuring out how this is gonna go, _he thought, huffing quietly and slipping his hands out of his pockets.

Dabi only knew Fossil by reputation. Giran had dug up the old man's criminal record at his request, laying out a history of assault and burglary going back decades. Petty bullshit, but that enthusiasm for bloodshed might help him fit in well with the League, and Shigaraki was eager to get his hands on one of the heavy-hitting meatshield types. Ten feet tall and armoured in a thorny bone exoskeleton, Fossil fit that bill, alright. Dabi idly wondered if the raptor skull staring him down was a helmet or the other man's actual head. He had a feeling those fangs would be barred even if they were real.

"So, the League sent their pet arsonist." Fossil's voice was jarringly smooth, coming from somewhere behind the sharp rows of teeth. "I was hoping they would. That saves me having to play along until I got to meet you. You've roasted quite a few of my old friends, Dabi of the blue flames." Well, then. That explained the cold reception. "Do you recall what you did to Okita Satoshi, the drug runner from Kamino?"

Dabi didn't, though that meant little. He rarely bothered with learning the names of the lowlives who approached him from time to time, hoping to cajole the League into doing business with them. Not that it mattered- it ended the same way for every single one of them. He decided to ignore the question.

"And here I thought you wanted to interview for the League. Did you even mean that shit you said about taking down society's false heroes?"

Fossil shrugged, making the dying sunlight glint off the shoulder-bones of his rain-slick armour. "You are a known follower of the Hero Killer. I knew it would catch your attention if I pretended to give a damn about that in public." He began to trudge closer, movements stiff and slow.

"I'd say that was clever, but you wouldn't be picking a fight with me if you were smart," Dabi sneered. He threw out his hands in front of him, aimed carefully like the weapons they were. "But I'll give you this much credit; you chose a pretty fitting epithet, _Fossil_. Small-minded thugs like you and your buddies are relics from the past. You that eager to join your buddy Satoshi in the tarpit?"

The old villain halted for a moment, leaving Dabi to wonder how he had survived this long if he was that easy to rile up. He couldn't see any eyes behind the skull's dark sockets, but he refused to look away either, trying to pin Fossil in place with his flat, contemptuous glare.

"Friend…? He was my _brother_." There was no evenness in Fossil's voice now, only grief and raw, bubbling rage.

_Here we go, _thought Dabi as the massive body began to quake. _Let's get this over with._ He knew of his opponent's quirk from Giran's intel. He wasn't worried- the unlucky old-timer was nearly in range for a one-hit kill.

Fossil grounded himself and raised his arms into the air. There was a series of sharp cracks as the exoskeletal armour came to... life, if that was that the right word to use for animated bone. White paste steamed out from his joints, making the armour bulge outward at the sleeves, hardening, splintering and forming rows of spurs. It flowed down to his hands, reshaping them into oversized, skeletal claws.

Dabi watched the display with idle curiosity. Every movement now seemed to take Fossil immense effort as he laboured under his own body's weight, but he kept moving forward, panting with exertion, the armour about his knees cracking and regenerating with each step. Part of Dabi wanted to see if Fossil would just keel over of a heart attack, but the ageing villain had come close enough, and Dabi would really prefer to head somewhere dry.

"Makin' yourself uglier ain't gonna help," the scarred villain said derisively. He flexed his hands and let his flames loose.

There was a sharp hiss as the pillar of blue flame boiled the rain to steam, but his quirk was too powerful to be doused. It engulfed Fossil's shambling form at nearly point-blank range; the dumb bastard hadn't even tried to get away.

Dabi kept the stream of fire going until the searing feeling in his wrist gave way to numbness. He dropped his arms, blinking his stinging eyes as they recovered from the sudden burst of light. _That was good and qui-_

Fossil's punch caught Dabi right beneath the ribs. The wind knocked straight out of him, he doubled over gagging as the bigger villain drew his arm back for another blow. It was all Dabi could do to stagger out of the way, and the part of him that wasn't already reeling was surprised he _could_ avoid the attack at such close range.

Flicking his eyes up to his opponent, he saw a monolith of blackened bone looming over him, a new layer of white rapidly creeping across its surface as the older one crumbled away. The convex shield hid Fossil's skull and any other vulnerable parts, revealing only the growing bulk of his arms. Coating upon coating of bone had ballooned the limbs to five times their original size- his fists were like wrecking balls. Felt like them, too.

Dabi managed to suck in a painful breath. There were red stains on Fossil's bristling knucklebones, and he could feel the hot blood pooling under his shirt where he'd been hit. No time now to check how bad the injury was. Dabi knew his limits, and if his quirk couldn't end this fight fast, he'd have to get out of dodge.

He didn't think Fossil could see with his face concealed like that, and he was slow and getting slower the more bone he generated. Dabi should still be able to outmaneuver him and escape. He righted himself in time to avoid another hit- now less like a punch so much as Fossil slamming his fist into the ground- and stepped back, pushing down the pain and the ominous feeling that he was going to lose yesterday's lunch at the slightest provocation.

"It's a shame things worked out this way, old man. Doesn't seem like you're what the League's lookin' for right now. But don't worry," he shot a leery grin at the rampaging villain, despite knowing he couldn't see it. "I'm sure we'll get together for a _follow-up interview_ later."

Swerving out of those massive arms' range, Dabi blasted Fossil with fireballs, rooting his enemy to the spot as he struggled to replace his shield faster than the flames could burn it away. Fossil gave an incoherent howl of rage and struggled to turn and follow Dabi's fading footsteps, but the young villain had already made his tactical retreat out onto the empty, darkening street.

Adrenaline hummed in Dabi's veins, urging him on as he weaved through the houses. It numbed him to the ache of the fresh blisters along his forearms, and he couldn't feel the steadily bleeding wound over his stomach at all.

He would soon enough, but by then it would be far too late.

* * *

They were talking about the Australian boy on the news again. Yasu went rigid as she stared down the headline on her phone's news app, or more rigid than a person already tended to be when they were pressed against the door on a crowded bus. Her finger hesitated over the thumbnail for the video for a good five seconds before she tapped down on it, already wincing at her own morbid curiosity. She felt like a voyeur as she watched the camera pan over the grieving family leaving the courthouse. It went in for a close-up of the mother, her shoulders squared triumphantly even as she blinked back tears.

"The Whitall case draws to an emotional close today," the voiceover announced through her headphones, "with the Australian courts handing down guilty verdicts to all five of the villains implicated in Ryan Whitall's abduction in August of last year." The kid's photograph flashed on-screen, showing a handsome, laughing teenager with multifaceted eyes like a moth. He looked no more than fourteen years old. "It is understood that the perpetrators targeted Whitall after discovering a video of his quirk that had been shared over social media, intending to use this ability to treat injuries they had obtained in a botched robbery. Members of the group have confessed to the kidnapping, but maintain that the boy's death while in captivity was unintentional."

_I don't think you could say the same for how they dumped his body in a lake afterwards_, Yasu thought grimly.

The news went on to play the short video that had doomed Ryan Whitall as it talked over the details of the case. A group of excited schoolkids gathered around a girl with a bloodied leg as a boy in a baggy uniform, his moth eyes and wings glittering, bent to examine the injury. Whitall ran a hand over the membrane of one wing, collecting a pinch of silvery dust and scattering it over the wound. As the spores touched the gash, the bleeding slowed, the flesh knitted back together and whole, unscarred skin bloomed over it, leaving no trace of the wound. He looked back up at his patient, smiling reassuringly.

As with every time she watched it, Yasu fixated on how the boy was drowning in that white school shirt of his. She couldn't stop thinking about how his parents had probably gotten it a couple of sizes too big, expecting him to grow into it. Expecting him to have the chance. Her expression remained impassive, but a hard lump formed in her throat.

The bus pulled into a stop, and the mass of people surged forward, snapping Yasu out of her melancholy as she was pushed along with the current. Grateful, she slipped her phone into her pocket and took a deep, steadying breath through her nose. She was glad that the Whitall family had received justice, but she hoped this was the last she heard of the case. It stressed her out, ridiculous though that was. Of course the murder was a tragedy, but why was she getting so worked up about the death of a person she never known, in a country an ocean away?

_I know why,_ Yasu admitted to herself. _It's the same reason they're talking about an Australian crime on the Japanese news._

Ryan Whitall was part of the tiny handful of people in the world with a quirk that could heal other people. And so was Shinkawa Yasu.

One of Yasu's clearest childhood memories was of the day her quirk manifested. A late bloomer, she had already been seven years old, and her relentless mundanity had started to make her family nervous. Her mother, Hibiki, had taken her to an endless parade of specialists and had so many x-rays of her feet taken, confirming again and again that she lacked the vestigial toe-joint linked to quirklesness, that the hospital's imaging department had begun to screen her calls. Hibiki had promised that her quirk simply must be subtle or have an obscure trigger, and when they discovered it, they would celebrate as though her birthday had come early.

But nobody can predict the future.

Yasu had been playing house with another second-grader, whose sprained ankle had kept her from the other kids' dodgeball game. Naomi hadn't seemed happy to be reduced to hanging out with the weird, quiet, quirkless girl. However, she was the kind of conscientious child who believed that if you were playing house, you had to do it _right_, so she'd thrown her arms around her 'wife' before leaving for the day's work at the old pinecone processing plant.

Yasu did not come from a very huggy household, and she had startled underneath the other girl, upsetting their balance and sending them both crashing to the ground. But there hadn't been any cries of pain from Naomi about her sore ankle. Her foot felt fine- perfectly fine.

"I must've walked it off," she had said, too relieved to even care about the fall, and had rushed off to join the dodgeball game without another thought.

Yasu, though, had stood staring down at her hands, contemplative.

When she had taken her suspicions to her mother, there had been another volley of tests by a battery of Quirk Registration Office employees before she had been officially recorded as the owner of the quirk 'Soothing Touch'.

She had still been sulking over the unexciting name when the QRO officer had sat her and Hibiki down to advise them to keep presenting Yasu as quirkless.

It was years before Whitall had been kidnapped, but his had not been a unique case. Healing quirks were so rare, but so _useful_, and not just to heroes.

They were also known to be dangerous if their users didn't have proper training. There were horror stories of regeneration quirks accidentally setting bones at wrong angles, spawning tumours, thinning blood until the patient bled out... It seemed Yasu's power was intuitive, but was she willing to bet a life on that? Then there all the pressure that would come if the public knew what she could do. All that hawk-like attention was not a healthy thing for a young child, after all, and perhaps the rest of her family wouldn't want all that fuss either.

They had not known Hibiki, clearly, but their first point still stood.

"It's not forever," her mother had told her, kneeling down with her hand on Yasu's shoulder. She had struggled against the urge to shuffle away, unused to being touched. "You can show it off as much as you like once you're a Hero." Her mother's eyes had been so _bright._

But nobody can predict the future.

Twenty-five-year-old Yasu stepped off the bus, on her way home from her job at the very same Quirk Registration Office where she had been given the most exciting news of her life, followed by- well, not the most devastating, but fairly close. It was not exciting work, most days, but it kept a roof over her head, and her coworkers weren't very nosy. The latter especially was a rare blessing in an office environment.

Like always, the walk back to her apartment was peaceful- hers was not the nicest neighbourhood in Jakku ward, but at least it was quiet during the day. It had just stopped raining, and Yasu kept her eyes locked on the dark, shiny pavement as she passed a block of abandoned storefronts, schooling herself not to think of anything in particular. _No more thinking about the news, no thinking about work, no thinking about- blood?_

Pausing with her foot in the air, Yasu had to stumble back to avoid standing in a darkening red pool on the sidewalk. Panic rising, she tried and failed to determine who it had come from, and saw further smears leading towards the puddle and away into what she was reasonably sure was a dead end behind the old laundromat. It must have been very fresh, or else the earlier rain would have washed it away.

Yasu bit her lip. _It could just be someone with a nosebleed, and in any case, whoever's bleeding could've been treated by now… _Her gaze followed blood-trail, which only grew thicker as it led away. _But it would have to be one hell of a nosebleed… And I really don't think they're likely to have found first-aid in that alleyway…_

Going in there would be a terrible idea. The _worst _idea. That was how people got ambushed and robbed and murdered. And with her quirk- She should definitely just call an ambulance, even look for a Pro Hero, unlikely as it was to find one around here. But would anybody even come if all she could tell them was that she had seen blood on the ground? What if someone died because she was too frightened to act? She shouldn't—she should- _oh, damn it._

She had once heard that living a good life came down to making decisions you could live with. Yasu had never been great at that, but checking up on someone and calling an ambulance wasn't an overly ambitious way to start. That was a small thing, only one person, probably not that badly hurt. That was easy, even she could handle that much.

This wasn't going to be a big deal.


	2. Chapter 2

**burn salve - two**

Yasu felt the person in the alleyway before she saw them. From the moment she stepped out of the fading sunlight, their pain buzzed insistently in her mind like a swarm of furious wasps. She habitually kept that aspect of her power unfocused, but the empathic feedback was still bad enough to set her teeth on edge as she approached. She wanted to run and escape it, but there was no turning away once she saw the body.

Propped up against the far wall was a lanky human figure. It was getting so dark and they were so still that Yasu could almost make herself believe all she was looking at was a pile of discarded clothing, but the pinging of her quirk was an undeniable sign of life.

It didn't feel like they were likely to live much longer, however. Never in Yasu's life had she sensed so much pain. The compulsion to stop it hit her all at once, inescapable as a riptide, and she was shoved forward with her vision blurring and hands shaking. She hadn't even known it could affect her so strongly, or she would never have approached.

Seen from up-close, it was probably a man, dark-haired, pale-skinned and dressed in a ragged coat. There was some kind of leathery mask over half his face and neck, and matching half-circles of- makeup, maybe, under his eyes, but Yasu couldn't see them well and hardly cared. Her attention was focused on the terrible wound over his abdomen, soaking his shirt through with gore. _If he dies, it'll be all your fault. You have to, you _have_ to..._

She didn't want to touch him, afraid of making it worse, but her hands reached out of their own accord. Struggling to snatch them away did no good: the bloodless fingers might as well have belonged to someone else. They moved aside the jacket, pushed up the shirt-

The body pitched forward.

Yasu exhaled sharply, but she was frozen in place as he tried to shove her away. She saw that his arms were wrapped in the same dark material that his mask was made of. Some sort of support item, maybe.

"What are you doing?"

Or that was what Yasu imagined he was trying to say. It came out more like, "whrrr 'a y' dnn…"

It was hard to concentrate enough to answer him. Yasu tried to redirect her focus to her environment; the cold evening air, the dampness soaking through her shoes, the reek of blood and, underneath it, the faint, inexplicable smell of burning meat.

"I'm trying... to help you," Yasu managed. "You're hurt... pretty badly." Hopefully, it would help him if she appeared calm, though she didn't have much of a say in the matter; her face was locked into its typical flat stare, as if nothing was wrong, as if he wasn't in any danger and her heart wasn't beating like a jackhammer against her ribs. The hands on his shirt pried it away from the wound. They were as gentle as possible, and it was all the more distressing that her body could move so carefully while out of her control.

Still, the man hissed as the wet fabric pulled away, making the injury bleed afresh. He tried again to thrash out of her grip but, barely holding on to consciousness, was too weak and confused to get away. Yasu thought she saw a flicker of blue light across one of his palms, likely his quirk trying to activate, but it was gone before she could be sure.

"I'm sorry, but this will go easier if you stop struggling." At her muttered apology, her unwanted captive locked his eyes with hers for just long enough to shoot her a hazy glare. Yasu guility dropped her gaze back down to his abdomen.

There looked to be a set of puncture marks on his left side. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but they must have been deep, given all the blood. Seeing them uncovered made her feel suddenly calm. Utterly in the grip of her quirk (_fix this fix this fix this_), she saw no use fighting anymore; the sooner she let it do its thing, the sooner she would belong to herself again.

Flying in the face of what little Yasu knew about medicine, the bare hands did not apply pressure to the bleeding wounds, but instead gently stroked the clammy skin above them, an uncomfortably intimate gesture. The man let out a hiss, but the stream of blood slowed to a stop. Yasu's quirk's empathic feedback bombarded her with information about the state of his injury, though Yasu couldn't process most of it. Her impression was that he'd been very fortunate. None of his organs or major blood vessels had been sliced or ruptured, which was probably the sort of miracle that got people declared saints centuries ago in other parts of the world.

Her quirk raced to purge the dirt and harmful bacteria in the punctures that would have inevitably led to infection. Given that the man had been lying in a damp alleyway, it seemed to take an age before it could move on to the equally draining tasks of mending the broken blood vessels and regenerating tissue.

What struck Yasu most was how unceremonious it all was. There was no glowing or bright-ringing sound effect like you saw in video games, just parts of the body knitting back together underneath those fingers. It almost seemed like the injuries were healing naturally, except for the speed.

The edges of the wounds drew together like they were being sewn up with tiny, invisible needles. Once more, Yasu's quirk pulsed through its patient's whole body to clear it of any trace of infection, then withdrew back into its exhausted host. A miasma of discomfort still surrounded the unmoving man- he must have had other, less immediately worrisome injuries- but the compulsion was no longer so strong that Yasu felt like she would die or lose her mind if she resisted. She drew the hands away, flexed them, and found that they were her own again.

Breathing an exhausted sigh and squeezing her hands into fists again and again, Yasu examined her quirk's work with dim bewilderment. The sun had gone down while she was working- she had hardly noticed- but the streetlight at the mouth of the alley had switched on, and by its light, she could just see the line of puckered scabs over the man's bloody abdomen. They wouldn't be pretty, but he would live. He'd live. The pressure behind Yasu's eyes began to ease. He'd live.

Whoever he was.

He had gone very still once the healing had begun. Yasu wondered if he, too, had resigned himself to the fact that this was a thing that was happening whether he liked it or not. Maybe he had passed out- at least that would save her from inconvenient questions about what she'd done.

_Or maybe I accidentally welded some critical artery shut, and he's dead after all,_ she thought jokingly. Mostly jokingly. Almost entirely jokingly. _I'd... better check his pulse…_

How she was going to find a pulse when his neck and arms were covered, Yasu had no idea, but she didn't get the chance to find out. Her limbs might have been made of lead for how heavy they were, and just thinking about lifting them made her head spin. It occurred to her that she really didn't know anything about her quirk's drawbacks. There was no guarantee that she wouldn't drop dead at any moment from fatigue, or that the guy wouldn't. She squeezed her eyes shut.

"I… didn't think this… over well…"

"You really didn't."

Yasu didn't have the energy to jump, but she just about managed to blink and roll her head in the direction of the voice. The person her quirk had saved was still sprawled against the wall, but at least he was awake. The weak light from the lamp shone on the uncovered half of his face and glinted gently off numerous- piercings, she thought they must be. The patches of makeup under his half-lidded eyes were thick and dark, and she couldn't really understand what look he was going for, but he seemed pretty dedicated to it, and it was true that the mask emphasised his cheekbones nicely, and ah, she really was exhausted, wasn't she…

Thankfully, he saved her from her own embarrassing, errant thoughts by speaking up again.

"You some kind of hero? ...No, scratch that, even a brat in training would know their limits better than that."

_That_ shocked a bit of life back into Yasu. Was this guy… looking down at her? From the floor of a dirty backstreet, lying in a puddle of mud and blood and possibly worse? It was too bizarre to even be angry about, so she managed a weak scoff instead.

"Not a hero. Unless you've got a… a really high opinion of QRO desk jockeys."

"A part-time vigilante, then? D'you often go around groping strangers you find lyin' behind dumpsters, or am I just special?" His words were suggestive, but there was a jeering edge to his voice. Yasu decided she was more comfortable with the mockery.

"I don't usually go around gro- _helping _anyone, so I guess you must be lucky."

That made him laugh, a low, husky sound with a bitter edge to it.

"Really lucky. I'm not joking," Yasu continued matter-of-factly. "If those wounds had been just a bit higher up I think you would have lost a kidney. You probably would have bled out and died before you had time to miss it, though."

"Yeah? Yeah, that'd be about right."

They settled into a long, comfortable silence, if only because they were too dazed to think very much.

"So, doc, am I gonna get the feeling back in my legs anytime soon or what."

"I don't really know," said Yasu. "I told you, I don't do this often. I didn't even know for sure that there were side-effects."

"Seriously? You can't expect me to believe you've got a quirk like that and don't know how to use it." He hoisted himself up to squint at her, demonstrating that he at least didn't need to worry about his legs. "If I grow a new head out of my stomach or something, I swear-"

"They did the basic quirk parameter tests when it first manifested, and they didn't find anything as dramatic as that." Though they hadn't made her power work nearly as hard as it had for him, and even then, only on a rat. They had told her more thorough trials would be necessary to be sure it was safe, the kind only expensive labs and hero schools had the facilities and training for. "But look, it might… be a good idea if we call the ambulance and get you checked out, just in case." _And hope I don't get in too much trouble for using my quirk illegally..._

"No."

"I don't like hospitals either, but it's important. You lost a lot of blood."

"I'm not going to the damn hospital." It was the kind of refusal that didn't leave room for argument. Defying Yasu's expectations, he hoisted himself to his feet, only wobbling a little.

"Hey." Realising she was going to be left sitting there alone (_hang on, what kind of asshole-?_), Yasu tried to scramble up herself, but her knees buckled beneath her, sending her sprawling back onto the ground.

The masked ingrate glanced over his shoulder at the noise, but walked on.

"Wait," she breathed, and shoved herself up. Her vision swam. "At least let me look at the wounds one more time, where I can see them properly-"

"The fuck's wrong with you? You gotta learn to mind your own business, lady. If this is some ploy to get me to pay you for stitching me up, you're barking up the wrong tree."

Yasu's arm reached out for him before she caught herself and forced it down. What _was _wrong with her? Thankfully she was not prone to blushing or stammering, or her humiliation would have been clear as day. "I'm... sorry. It's my quirk, I think. I can't control it."

"You're not a preschooler. Get a hold of yourself."

Now that he was out of the shadows, Yasu could see the challenge in his vividly turquoise eyes, but she hardly registered it because oh, those patches weren't makeup, that wasn't a mask along his jaw, those were…

Those were burns so severe that the skin had thickened and warped until it looked like peeling leather. Blood oozed from the seams where damaged flesh was crudely bound to healthy skin with surgical staples. There was still more scarring down his arms to his wrists, and they were peppered with open, weeping blisters, and Yasu remembered the smell of roasting meat with a stab of realisation. Shock froze her to the spot as he leered down at her, understanding that she was seeing him properly for the first time.

"What's wrong? Not the most flattering light for me, huh...?"

She couldn't believe she hadn't noticed. True, he was buzzing with pain even after being healed of his stab wounds and her quirk was still tugging at her mind drowsily (_you should, you should_), but it felt so subdued compared to the agony from earlier. Most likely he'd somehow gotten used to it, and the thought made her want to wince.

His leer began to morph into a frown. Yasu knew a guy like this would probably resent pity, so she tried not to show any; for once, she was grateful that her flat black eyes were naturally inexpressive. Still, whatever he saw in her face seemed to only agitate him more- or was it what he didn't see?

Ah. He wanted her to be scared of his face. To run in fear or scream for a hero or something. Yasu didn't really understand why wounds were considered frightening when nobody was in immediate danger of dying of them, but she knew from horror movies that normal people felt that way. She considered pretending to quail a little, just to placate this unpredictable stranger, but it was a little too late.

He clearly wanted to be treated like he was dangerous, and he might well be- Yasu shoved away the lingering urge to heal, took a step back and spread her arms out at her sides to show she was harmless.

"I'm sorry," she said, keeping her voice even. "I shouldn't be crowding you. You've had a rough day."

He didn't look any happier, but some of the tension eased out of his shoulders.

"If you understand that much, then get outta here already."

Sound advice. Yasu manoeuvred around him, slowed as much by caution as her lingering exhaustion, but she couldn't help but stop at the mouth of the alleyway.

"Keep the scabs clean and disinfected, okay? And if you do start growing a new head, go see a real doctor. Please." Sketchy though he might be, she couldn't believe he deserved any more aching scars.

He didn't say anything, just leaned against the wall with his hands stuffed into his pockets, glaring out from beneath his mop of black hair. It was the perplexed kind of scowl, Yasu noted, not an aggressive one.

_It's hard to tell through all the scarring, _Yasu mused, _but really, he doesn't act any older than me. If I _ever _acted my age._

Yasu walked until the last pings of the burned man's pain ebbed out of her quirk's range. Her mind cleared, and by the time she was climbing the stairs to her apartment the bubbles of anxiety had been washed away in a tsunami of humiliation. How stupid she had been, again. That scenario could have ended badly in a hundred different ways. It could have been a trap, he could have lashed out with some dangerous quirk, or her own could have backfired and made his condition even worse. Plus, she had flagrantly tossed aside the caution that had been drummed into her since she was a child, and now had to rely on the discretion of a stranger to keep her healing quirk under wraps. Well, that and the fact that he didn't know her name. Was she really that stupid, or was it something worse than that?

Could Yasu trust her own mind once her quirk got its hooks into her?

Still, if she hadn't tried to help, that guy would have...

A shudder passed through her as she unlocked her apartment door, edged around the barricade of old cardboard boxes that took up most of her living room and lowered her sore body onto the second-hand couch slotted into a corner. It was too late in the day to think about quirks or agency or young men bleeding out alone in the dark. She felt like somebody had wrung all the energy out of her like water from a sponge. She needed a meal. She needed a bath. She needed to disinfect the scrapes she'd gotten kneeling on the dirty asphalt. She listed these things to herself, but what she needed most of all was sleep, and her body had made the executive decision that it needed it _right that moment_. Her head nodded down onto her chest, and she passed clear out with the smell of blood and burning still lingering on her clothes.

* * *

Outside, melded into the shadows of the apartment complex, Dabi watched as the apartment door slid shut and the windows flooded with light. What a weird, neurotic girl, already an adult and unable to control her own quirk. _If she'd been born with mine,_ he thought, _she wouldn't have made it past five years old._

Still… He shoved one hand up his loose shirt and gingerly ran it over his side. His fingers skimmed the scabs and found them only a little sore, scarcely registering compared to the constant background ache of scars.

The burns, by his standards... weren't actually doing too badly. There was the usual invasive pull of his staples on the unscarred skin and the occasional shooting pain along the seams, but they felt free of the telltale heat of infection and were hardly bleeding at all.

Any given fight took its toll on Dabi's body, even if he never took a hit. This was… a nice change of pace. And the girl had forgotten to ask for anything in return, too. Not that Dabi would have given it to her._ Guess I really won the useful dumbass lottery, huh?_

Dabi glanced behind him at the apartment complex, then around the empty street until he saw the sign at the end of the road. He repeated the block and building numbers in his head until he had them memorized, and slunk away into the night.


End file.
